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Software Industry Rallies Behind Eclipse Programming Contest

CASCON, Markham, Ontario (CA), October 7, 2003 - - Propelling software development across multiple platforms, languages and vendors, IBM and other software industry leaders today announced the International Challenge for Eclipse (ICE), www.scs.carleton.ca/ice, an educational initiative and programming contest that awards students and professional developers world-wide with both prizes and career opportunities based on juried competition and evaluation of their original plug-ins for the Eclipse platform.

Eclipse establishes an ecosystem of royalty-free technology, an open universal platform for tools integration. Tools built using Eclipse give developers language and platform freedom of choice in multi-vendor supported environments. Eclipse enables developers to work with best-of-breed tools from different vendors in an integrated, portal-like environment - making it easier for technology producers and consumers to create, integrate, and use software tools, saving developers time and money.

The announcement was made at CASCON 2003, the 13th Annual IBM Centers for Advanced Studies Conference, the premier computer science and software engineering conference in Canada.

The ICE competition involves a comprehensive educational program that culminates in the submission of entries. First, university teachers and graduate students register on the website to receive teaching materials. These instructors can participate in a "Teach the Teachers" webcast on October 24, a course developed by Carleton University professor Dwight Deugo. Teachers then arrange a two-day course on Eclipse for their students. Following this, entrants can register on the ICE website and submit plug-ins. Deadline for submissions is December 8, 2003. Judging will take place by IBM and Eclipse experts from sponsoring companies. The winners will be announced February 2004.

Winners will receive awards, including IBM ThinkPads, internship opportunities at IBM, licenses to sponsors' development software, a Hewlett-Packard iPAQ pocket PC, and a trip to the European Theory and Practice of Software conference - ETAPS 2004 - in Barcelona to receive recognition at an IBM-hosted eclipse Technology eXchange (eTX) reception.

The ICE contest is the latest in the Eclipse organization's activity in the educational arena. In 2003, Eclipse Innovation Grants were approved at a total of $1.25 million. To date, more than 375 Eclipse Platform oriented projects have been recognized by community sites like http://eclipse-plugins.2y.net/ and http://www.sourceforge.org/ that independently track and host Eclipse related projects.

"ICE contest submissions will contribute to open-source projects to help bring about improvements to the development process and developer experience," said Gabby Silberman, Program Director, IBM Centers for Advanced Studies (www.cas.ibm.com) at IBM TJ Watson Research Center.

"Eclipse has now 49 supporting members and the number of download requests of Eclipse has grown to over 10 million in the past two years, largely due to the enthusiasm of the developer community. Eclipse has helped research projects achieve a jump start thanks to reuse of mature and proven technology," he added.

Said Brian Barry, Eclipse Technology Project Lead and Academic Liaison, "The International Challenge for Eclipse represents another way that supporters of this technology movement are reaching out to today's innovators. We anticipate that submissions to ICE will embody the spirit of new ideas and approaches expressed specifically for and by participants in the Eclipse ecosystem."

Five prizes will be awarded in the student category, five in the open category, and three teacher/mentor prizes.

IBM Corporationwww.ibm.com
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About Eclipse
Eclipse has established an open-source ecosystem of tools providers and consumers by creating technology and an open universal platform for tools integration. The open-source Eclipse community creates royalty-free technology as a platform for tools integration. Eclipse based tools give developers freedom of choice in a multi-language, multi-platform, multi-vendor supported environment. Eclipse delivers a plug-in based framework that makes it easier to create, integrate and use software tools, saving time and money. By collaborating and sharing core integration technology, tool producers can concentrate on their areas of expertise and the creation of new development technology. The Eclipse Platform is written in the Java language, and comes with extensive plug-in construction toolkits and examples. It has already been deployed on a range of development workstations including HP-UX®, Solaris®, AIX®, Linux®, MAC OS X®, QNX® Neutrino® and Windows® based systems. Full details of the Eclipse community and white papers documenting the design of the Eclipse Platform are available at www.eclipse.org.